The introduction of frame relay in the early 1990's brought lower cost, higher bandwidth, improved reliability, and simpler management control to enterprise wide area networks (WANs) as compared to X.25 and point-to-point leased-line alternatives. Frame relay, together with single-source asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services, still dominate the enterprise WAN market for corporate Internet traffic. However, these Internet-based services are not as reliable as processing systems at network nodes and are difficult to predict performance of network traffic. In addition, many networks experience disruptions and congestion on individual paths, for example, due to old equipment and marginal cable and connector conditions. Having such dependencies on single network paths, causes network outages and low performance even with new installations.
While performance, reliability, and predictability of a network has improved due to improvements in processor and communication architectures and implementations, the underlying networks and message passing protocols remain inefficient and hold back potential performance improvements.